The SDFLA Blog is dedicated to providing news and notes regarding federal practice in the Southern District of Florida. The New Times calls the blog "the definitive source on South Florida's federal court system." All tips on court happenings are welcome and will remain anonymous. Please email David Markus at dmarkus@markuslaw.com

Monday, July 20, 2015

Is prison reform for non-violent drug offenders alone enough to solve the problem?

Suppose every federal drug offender were released today. That would
cut the incarceration rate to about 693 inmates per 100,000 population.
Suppose further that every drug offender in a state prison were
also released. That would get the rate down to 625. It’s a significant
drop, no question — these hypothetical measures would shrink the overall
prison population by about 14 percent. (There isn’t data from BJS on
the most serious charges faced by those in local jails, so let’s assume
that no jail inmates are released in these scenarios.)
But let’s have some international context. Even in that extreme
hypothetical situation, the U.S. would still be an incarceration
outlier. Even without its many inmates who are convicted of drug
charges, the U.S. still leads the world in imprisoning people. Next is
the U.S. Virgin Islands, with a rate of 542 per 100,000 people, followed
by Turkmenistan at 522 and Cuba at 510. Russia’s rate is 463. (See the
bottom of this post for the full list of international incarceration
rates. The international data is from the International Centre for Prison Studies, and I’ve restricted the list to countries with a population of at least 100,000.)
Locking up drug offenders is only part of the larger story behind
mass incarceration. Other reasons for the high rates include the
severity of nondrug sentencing, the attitudes of judges and prosecutors,
a high rate of violent crime such as murder, and rising crime rates in
the 1970s and 1980s. “The increase in U.S. incarceration rates over the
past 40 years is preponderantly the result of increases both in the
likelihood of imprisonment and in lengths of prison sentences,” the
National Research Council wrote in a report last year.
Reformers interested in ending mass incarceration — or at least in
getting America’s rates in line with those internationally — will have
to think far more broadly.1 It’s a much thornier problem than that.

Meantime, congratulations to Judge Moreno on 25 years on the bench. He's been a pillar of this District and has done a lot to transform the court for the better. This weekend he celebrated with his law clerks from all over the country who flew in to be with him.

ADDED -- I'm told by one of my favorite tipsters that Judge Moreno's clerks (more than 40 of them were here this weekend) raised money to start a scholarship in Judge Moreno's name at the University of Miami. Really really nice.

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

Did anyone see the article in the paper about the cop who got sentenced to 3 years for protecting a murderous pot ring? I was wondering why no 924(c) and then I remembered he wasn't poor and black. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

The Southern District of Florida blog was started by David Oscar Markus, who is a criminal trial and appellate lawyer in Miami, Florida. He frequently practices in federal courts around the country, including his hometown, the Southern District of Florida and the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. He is a former law clerk to then-Chief Judge of the District, Edward B. Davis.